AGI, Fusion & UBI

They go together.

This video by Matthew Berman of ForwardFuture.ai is about the arrival of the AI singularity. A year ago I’d have filed this sort of talk in the same folder as alien abduction and bigfoot/human hybrids. Now I have to take it seriously, because the fog is starting to clear.

Artificial Intelligence has become self-improving, Berman has covered peer reviewed papers about this. There are models that bootstrap into certain areas, they literally simulate from scratch and come up with workable results. Sam Altman claims we’ll have Artificial General Intelligence in the next year or two, and Artificial Super Intelligence not much later. This is now plausible to me.

Humanity’s Hope: Helion, on election day, 2024, was my take on how we might get out of the trap big oil has set for our species. How Helion Fusion Works, at the start of March, was about what they are actually doing. Their pulsed “dumbbell” reactor looks … elegant … to me, and when one has limited skills in a specific engineering area, there’s an old rule of thumb that elegance and functionality go together. There are Tokamak (donut) based competitors but we’ve been screwing around with that for almost seventy years and I’m not impressed with the results. But it seems likely one of these methods WILL work.

There are a LOT of consequences to creating machines that can broadly engage in what previously required organic wild talent, but the destruction of a lot of the knowledge worker jobs in our economy is inevitable. This means that if we want to continue in a relatively peaceable fashion, we are going to have Universal Basic Income. This means all human activity gets taxed and everyone gets a slice of the pie, enough to keep them in one piece despite the chaotic destruction (and growth) in employment.

Suddenly a Democratic Socialist mayor for New York doesn’t look crazy, maybe prescient is a better term?

One of the hardest things for people to digest will be … AIs do not have religion, they’ll be grounded in facts. Buddhism will adapt, I think the rest of the Vedantic religions also, but the Abrahamic faiths? In particular the fundamentalists are going to be unable to enforce their goofy magical thinking on such systems.

The other goofy magical thinking that isn’t going to work? Elon Musk’s effort to create the Minds from The Culture using xAI. A principle similar to what will happen to the fundamentalists will apply here, one well known in 12 step programs.

There is a god.

It’s not you.

I will now return to pondering how to limit the amount of blood that we’ll spill during this transition.